


Universal Gravitation

by Kainosite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - BDSM, Alternate Universe - Sexy Toulon, Cock & Ball Torture, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Large Insertion, M/M, Power Imbalance, Pre-Slash, Predicament Bondage, Punishment, Sexual Slavery, Sexy Toulon, Toulon Era, non-consensual object insertion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-04-20
Packaged: 2020-01-22 22:10:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18536455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: Javert watches the convict Jean Valjean defy the law of gravity, and reconsiders his views on rehabilitation.





	Universal Gravitation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [iberiandoctor (jehane)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/gifts).
  * Inspired by [La Loterie de Saint-Valentin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/9603956) by [iberiandoctor (jehane)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehane/pseuds/iberiandoctor). 



> From the moment I saw your “Predicament Bondage” request, I knew this was something the Sexy BDSM Bagne needed to explore.
> 
> Thanks to E for the beta!

The prisons of France did not, as a rule, attract great intellects to their service. It was the profession of those who by bad luck or incapacity could not find themselves a better, and it was richer in brutes and drunkards than in poets or philosophers.

Still, the work was dull and unpleasant, and faced with the grim monotony of the bagne even men like these sought diversions. Some lost themselves in cheap wine or the dubious pleasures to be found in the bodies of their charges. Gambling with cards or dice, though forbidden, was rife; Javert had swiftly learned that it was not done to report it. Others found more solitary pursuits. Chabaud painted watercolors. M. Maugin fancied himself a naturalist and spent his spare time wandering the hills in search of butterflies. Javert was slowly committing every article of the new Code of Criminal Instruction to memory.

And then there were those who hoped to refine from the haphazard customs of their grubby profession a science.

The commissaire permitted these experiments so long as they did not interfere with the work of the bagne, more from indifference than a devotion to human progress. The Age of Enlightenment did not cast its rays very far into the salles. As a rule, Javert viewed this budding field of penology with the same disinterest: it was the pet project of several of his superiors and so he could not condemn it outright, but it seemed to him an overcomplication. To learn how things had always been done and then to perform one’s duties flawlessly and unfailingly – that discipline was the height of their profession, not all this fussing about with ropes and notebooks.

Nevertheless, he could not help but observe their work as he passed through the prison yards, and he had to admit that some of the punishments they devised had a diabolical elegance.

Take, for instance, the penalty for recidivist escapees, which was currently being visited upon the convict known as Jean-le-Cric.

Last night a little before roll call the cannon had been fired to announce an escape. Le Cric and his chainmate had been sent on some errand; only the chainmate returned. Somehow the guards on duty failed to notice this until they were lining everyone up to count them back into their salles, at which point it became clear that 28965 was conspicuously missing his pair.

It had not been much of an escape. Le Cric did not even make it out of the arsenal before he was recaptured. When they found him he had not resisted, which proved perhaps that he could be taught, though not quickly enough to save him from three more years in the galleys and another turn in the pillory. Such a swift restoration of order should have been cause for celebration, but Javert felt strangely cheated when he heard the news, as if only he had the right to lay hands upon the brute and bring him to heel. But of course this was absurd. The man belonged to the law, not to Javert, and the guards who made up the search party were its agents just as much as he.

A scattering of bruises on Le Cric’s hips and jaw showed that they had asserted that authority before they brought him in. The prison code did not permit junior guards such liberties, but it was commonly understood to be one of the perks of a successful recapture. Last time no one thought to try it because Le Cric had broken Boyer’s nose. Javert found himself wishing, inexcusably, that the convict had broken someone’s nose this time as well, but Le Cric had behaved himself, and so he was not thrown into the dungeon again but instead chained out in the yard where all might witness his punishment.

Along the western wall of the main yard outside the Salle of the Indociles there stood a row of wooden posts, three meters high and as wide around as a the topmast of a warship, which was what they once had been. At regular intervals they were banded with metal brackets into which the pillory boards or other fittings could be slotted, and at the head and foot of each were set a pair of heavy iron rings. They were well anchored in the earth, and those prisoners sentenced to exposition or flogging or public use swiftly discovered that a pole sturdy enough to withstand the force of a frigate at full sail was more than sufficient to contain the squirming of an unhappy convict, even one as strong as Jean-le-Cric.

He had good reason to squirm, though very little room to do so. His manacled hands were chained above his head, at a height that just allowed his heels to touch the ground, and his ankles were shackled to the iron ring at his feet. At his back was the unyielding wood of the post, and he could not lean very far forward, for a length of twine had been wrapped a dozen times around his balls and tied to the ring on the opposite side of the post.

His movement was thus constrained in all directions. By seizing hold of the chains above his head he could pull himself up on tiptoe, but he could not go far before he would be checked by the shackles on his ankles. There was no slack in his chains to permit him to kneel down or slouch against the pole. It was impossible to move forward or backward. Le Cric was thus obliged to stand perfectly erect, as rigid and immobile as a sentry. Still, he might have kept his watch in only mild discomfort if not for the device that had been slotted into the bracket below his waist.

It consisted of a little shelf, a sort of narrow bench on which a weary convict might sit to rest his legs, but from the center there rose a thick phallus of polished wood. It was as long as Javert’s hand and slightly conical; the round head was almost of human proportions, but it widened as it went down until it grew so thick that he could not wrap his thumb and forefinger around the base. With their usual dark humor the convicts had dubbed it the _pichot paire_ , the “little father” in the language of Javert’s childhood, and there were those among them who feared it more than the lash.

It was used most often in cases of sodomy, to punish those who had given to their fellows that which ought to be the exclusive privilege of the guards. For them the _pichot paire_ was the whole of the penalty: their arms were merely bound behind them on the far side of the post so they could not take their weight upon their hands. When the guards chained the offender into place in the morning they helped him to settle onto his hard perch, and on those occasions when they felt some sympathy for the wretch – for in the bagne it was often the case that one party in these illicit couplings was not entirely willing – they would even slick the wood with oil to ease its passage.

It was still a severe discipline, for the wooden phallus was too large for any man to take comfortably and once seated the convict was shackled so he could not rise until he was released. When the culprits were taken down at the end of the day they were often tearful and trembling, pitifully grateful to service any of the guards who wished to make use of them and then proceed to the flogging that would complete their sentence. But it made no great demands on their character. It was a straightforward lesson taught with brutal simplicity: he who offered his body to his comrades would soon find himself sharing it with a less pleasant companion. The convict was given no choice in the matter, and thus had no chance to compound his punishment by his own weakness and stupidity.

No such clemency was extended to the recidivist escapee, for the science of the penologists had replicated in perfect miniature the conditions of his crime. A sort of escape was possible in two directions. By gripping the chains that bound his hands and pulling himself up on his tiptoes he could hold himself above the phallus, though doing so would strain the muscles of his arms and calves. Alternatively, by a contortion of his spine he could thrust his hips forward beyond the shelf and stand upon the balls of his feet, but this would strain other muscles in his legs and pull tight the rope around his testes.

The only true relief lay in sitting on the little shelf and resting his feet flat upon the ground, but for that, of course, he must submit to the _pichot paire_.

In this lay the genius of the punishment, for unlike the sodomite the recidivist was obliged to _choose_ that cruel penetration, to cease the futile rebellion that had led to his repeated attempts at escape and submit to his chastenment voluntarily. He would have no respite until he did, for with every minute he delayed the muscles of his arms and legs would weaken and the pressure on his balls would grow steadily more unbearable. Reason demanded that he surrender at once and minimize his suffering as best he could. And yet, even knowing this, most convicts took more than an hour to force themselves down onto the phallus, for the _pichot paire_ was a stern master, thick and unyielding, and there was no merciful oil to help a recidivist escapee.

From what Javert had seen so far, Jean-le-Cric was not the sort to swiftly give in to reason.

Javert was on the night shift this week and his duties had ended just after reveille, but in the summers when nights were short and the convicts were fractious with the heat it was his habit to see the work gangs off to their labors before he retired. The brief night shift did not seem to him to constitute a full day’s work, and the guards on the day shift were always grateful for an extra hand with the morning chaos. He had ushered his charges from the salle and helped with the searches and prodded them into line for roll call and ensured the morning bread ration was distributed with a minimum of theft or violence, and all the while he had been conscious of the still figure of Le Cric on the far side of the yard, bound to his post.

The convicts had filed out in their brigades, not without flinging some good-humored insults and obscene suggestions at Le Cric as they passed, for theirs was a conditional solidarity. Had he succeeded in his escape they would have cheered him to the heavens, for there was no hero in the bagne like the man who pulled one over on the guards. But his recapture reminded them of a truth they would prefer to forget: in the end the forces of order would always prevail. In the face of the firing squad they were somber, but the wretch who earned himself some lesser penalty could expect nothing from his fellows but jeers and humiliation.

Le Cric bore their insults with the same sullen stoicism as he had endured the rest of his punishment, and when the last of his comrades had trooped through the gate and left the two of them alone, he lifted his eyes and met Javert’s across the yard. As always, there was a peculiar penetration in the convict’s gaze, as if it was Javert who had been stripped naked and staked out for anyone to see, all his secrets laid bare.

It was a challenge he could not fail to answer. He came across the yard and stood before the post.

“Back here again, 24601?” he asked, because reminding Le Cric of the dismal failure of his escape and the degradation of his current circumstances seemed like the swiftest way to reassert the proper order of things.

Le Cric did not dignify this with a response, merely looked at Javert with those unfathomable and penetrating eyes.

Javert felt immediately that he had made a fool of himself. Whatever this strange connection was between them, it deserved something better than a statement of the obvious, especially one that was half a lie. He rigorously observed the protocols of the bagne and he was careful in his speech, but in his own mind he had never succeeded in referring to Le Cric by his number.

Perversely, it was even harder to think of him as 24601 when he was naked and chained to a pole.

In stripping him of the red uniform of the bagne the guards had sought to degrade him, but instead they had stripped away that which marked him as a convict and left only the man. Naked, bound, immovable, with his scarred back hidden by the post and the muscles of his arms bulging where he held himself above the phallus, Jean-le-Cric had the majestic and solemn air of a classical sculpture. He looked like nothing so much as a living version of the caryatid he’d once rescued during the repairs at the town hall. If Javert didn’t know the nature of the beast that lay within, he might have been naive enough to see a sort of nobility in that powerful torso, in the strong lines of that broad, impassive face.

It would make no difference. The penologists had seen to that. The minds of men might be weak and easily seduced by a muscular physique, but Le Cric had more than the guards arrayed against him now.

“You should yield,” Javert said. “You can no more defy the laws of nature than you can the laws of man. The law is always stronger. You’ll have to drop eventually. Do it now and get it over with.”

By way of answer Le Cric adjusted his grip on the chains with a flexing of corded muscles and hoisted himself a little higher. There was an obstinate set to the convict’s jaw and a banked fire in his eyes; it was clear this was a lesson he intended to learn the hard way.

“I only have to make it until they come back from the afternoon shift,” Le Cric said.

“I know. You won’t.”

The convict should have said ‘monsieur’, but Javert did not trouble himself to correct him. Gravity was about to administer a harsher beating than he could. The afternoon work shift ended at eight o’clock in the evening. That was fourteen hours away, and no man could last that long, not even Jean-le-Cric.

Javert shook his head at the man’s stubborn defiance and took himself off to bed.  
  


* * *

  
Martin and Teisseire were already fast asleep when he came back to his little room in the barracks, and Coste was on the day shift and had gone out with the work gangs. Javert lay down feeling pleasantly unobserved. When he closed his eyes he saw Jean-le-Cric in his chains, shifting position perhaps as he began to feel the strain on his arms, arching his back to avoid the _pichot paire_ and pulled back by the sharp tug on his balls, conscious all the time of the wooden phallus sliding between his buttocks or pressing at the base of his spine. Javert grew half-hard thinking of this, but he did not grant himself permission to touch his cock. Instead he listed off the articles of the Code of Instruction until the heat in his loins cooled and he drifted off to sleep, pleased with his self-discipline.

He woke in mid-afternoon, feeling refreshed and well rested. He had slept clean through the lunchtime commotion, which was always the bane of the night shift, and if he had any dreams he did not remember them. He completed his daily toilet with methodical thoroughness and had something to eat, and asked M. Maugin if there was anything that needed doing, and did it, and ran a few errands for him besides, and only then did he allow himself to wonder how Le Cric was getting on with his punishment.

Most of the yard was in shadow and the light was slanting yellow across the wall of the hospital when Javert finally came out to check on him. He had slept through the worst of the midday heat, but as he stepped over the threshold the searing air struck him like a blow. It was a little after four o’clock. The work gangs had returned for lunch and gone back out again, and on the isle of the bagne everything was still, for there was no ship in the dry dock and the convicts were all working elsewhere.

Jean Valjean was still clinging doggedly to his chains, which seemed both incredible and somehow inevitable, as if it were impossible that he should offer this surrender except in Javert’s presence. It was a feat of almost unbelievable strength; if any other convict had held out for even half so long, Javert had not heard of it. And yet it was clear that even Jean-le-Cric could not last much longer.

He was covered from head to toe in a sheen of sweat, and there was an uncontrollable tremor in the muscles of his right thigh. His skin was flushed with sunburn, scorched an angry red in those places usually covered by his clothes, for even convicts hardened to outside work could not come unscathed through this prolonged exposure. His balls, so fresh and pink in the morning, had swollen in their binding and darkened to the dusky, bruised purple of a ripe plum. His head, held up so proudly when Javert left him ten hours earlier, hung dejectedly between his shoulders. All in all it was as thorough a portrait of human misery as even the bagne could paint.

There were almost four hours left before the end of the work day when Le Cric would be released from this torment. He would not make it, and as he lifted his head wearily at Javert’s approach, Javert could see in his eyes that he knew it.

They stood there without speaking for a time, in the stillness and the heat. Jean-le-Cric shifted forward slightly, trying to take some of his weight onto the balls of his feet, and then jerked himself upright again with a clank of manacles and a hiss of pain. As his balls swelled with trapped blood the twist of rope had tightened, and the pressure that had been unpleasant in the morning was now intolerable.

There was no avenue of relief left to him but one, as the architects of penology had intended from the beginning.

Javert was struck, abruptly and unexpectedly, by a pang of sympathy. He felt no pity for rebellion, but Valjean was not fighting against authority – that fight had been lost from the moment he was chained to the post. His battle now was not against the guards, but against his own pride; he was struggling not to resist but to yield. Javert was reminded of himself as a small boy, learning to map the unbridgeable divide between those embraced by society and those irredeemably excluded from it. To cease to strive for that which was unattainable and accept the painful reality, to gain that mastery over oneself… It had been a hard lesson. He could feel some compassion for a fellow pupil.

“I will help you, if you wish,” he said.

Le Cric gave him a look in which weariness and pain mingled with hatred and something else.

“You won’t let me down from here.” It was not a question. Jean-le-Cric had been watching him for a long time. He already knew the answer.

“No. I cannot, and I would not even if I could.”

Javert had neither the manacle key nor the authorization to release him, and he would not intercede to lighten a just punishment. But that was not what he had offered.

“What, then?”

Javert said nothing. Le Cric already knew this answer as well. After a while he bit his lip, looked away, and nodded slightly.

It was all the permission Javert needed. He stepped up and rapped the convict smartly on the right elbow with his baton.

It gave out as it was bound to, for Javert had struck him hard enough to numb his arm. Valjean lost his grip on the chain and fell; there was no longer strength enough in his legs to hold him up. He was hanging now by only one hand. The phallus jabbed him in the thigh.

“Fucking hell!”

Javert raised his eyebrows and tapped his baton meaningfully against his palm.

“Fucking hell, _monsieur_ ,” Le Cric amended, and then added sullenly, “That wasn’t helpful.”

“Yes, it was. The difficult thing is making up your mind to let go. You’re halfway there. Here.” Javert stuck his baton in his belt and laid a hand on the damp, trembling thigh, reaching under it with the other to grope for the phallus. Le Cric’s long struggle had gained him something, at least; the polished wood was slick with the sweat he’d been dripping onto it all day, and so was the cleft between his buttocks. He would not have to take the thing entirely dry.

It was necessary that Le Cric should lower himself onto the phallus and Javert could not ease him by taking some of his weight, but the punishment did not require that he aim badly and jab himself in the arse several times before he could get himself properly lined up. Javert guided him so that he was centered above the _pichot paire_ , with the round head resting just below the puckered ring of muscle waiting reluctantly to receive it.

Valjean’s hole was a little swollen from the guards’ attentions the night before, and he swallowed hard as he felt the wooden knob brush against his tender opening. The man was stupidly determined to defy the law and evade his rightful sentence, but he was not a coward; Javert had seen him take a flogging almost in silence. There was a reason such a man would cling to his chains for ten hours rather than subject himself to the _pichot paire_ , and it was not all to do with the indignity of allowing himself to be fucked by a block of wood.

Javert squeezed Le Cric’s thigh hard and did not release it. A little pain elsewhere would offer a distraction and make the penetration easier to bear.

“When you’re ready.”

Valjean met his eyes and nodded. He struggled to get his feet under him just for a moment, and gradually eased his hold on the chains until his weight was resting on the wood.

Javert could see the exact moment when it breached him by the tightening of the muscles in his face. For a moment he lost his grip on the chain and slid down an inch in an instant, pain tearing a hoarse cry from his lips.

“Ah!”

“Steady now. Slowly. Keep your eyes on me and try not to think about it too much.”

If Valjean managed to follow this instruction it was possible the grim thought had not yet entered his mind, but the worst was yet to come. The phallus widened near its base, and he would have no real rest until he was fully seated on it. And the sweat that had eased its entry was inside him now. The lower span of wood was drier and there would be more friction.

His face pale even beneath the flush of sunburn and his convict’s tan, Le Cric slowly lowered himself down a second inch, and then a third.

Javert slipped his free hand in between the post and Valjean’s back, just above the curve of his buttocks, and pressed his fingers against the sweat-slick flesh. He’d seen the other guards rub circles there sometimes, when a new prisoner was struggling to take a cock.

Little by little, Le Cric gained another inch. He had slid down more than half of the phallus’s length, although the thickest, driest section was still to come. Both of his thighs were trembling now, and his breath came harsh and ragged. His eyes never left Javert’s face.

Slowly, slowly, he lowered himself down another inch, and then came to a halt.

“Monsieur, I can’t,” he whispered, and for the first time since his punishment began Javert saw a trace of shame in his face. “I can’t anymore.”

Javert glanced down. Le Cric would be able to stop after another inch or so, for it was not actually necessary for him to slide all the way down to the base of the phallus so that he could sit on the shelf and take some of the weight off his feet. After ten hours of hoisting himself above it with his grip on the chains, simply to release his hold and stand flat-footed would no doubt be relief enough, at least for a time. But his heels were still suspended an inch above the ground, and until they touched the packed earth at the base of the post he would have no ease.

“You will,” Javert said. “You must. Come, there is only a little more to take, and then you can rest.”

Valjean gave a mute, terrified shake of his head and pulled himself up on the chains a little, losing a few precious centimeters. The rim of his hole, scraped raw by the ordeal, left a faint smear of blood on the wood.

Javert sighed.

“You are still fighting it. Yield, surrender yourself, open your body to the phallus, and this will soon be over. It will be easier if you submit, I promise you.”

Le Cric searched his face as if he was wondering whether he could trust this promise, coming as it did from an agent of the same powers that had subjected him to this torment. Javert met his gaze levelly. He might be young, but he spoke out of his own experience, with the certainty of authority and the absolute confidence of a man who never lied. Bound, trapped, rebuffed by agony on all sides, Le Cric could have no faith left in his own ability to extricate himself from the misery his rebellion had brought upon him. The pain was too great to be masked by anger or made endurable by stoicism. Even the strength of his arms had failed him. He could not save himself from this hell.

But he could choose to trust Javert.

Valjean took a deep breath and then bore down with a despairing groan. His strained rim stretched still further, creeping down the phallus in almost imperceptible increments. His knuckles were white where they curled around the chains, and his breath came in gasping sobs. Beneath his hand Javert felt the muscles of Valjean’s back twitch in convulsive ripples as he struggled to take the phallus deeper. He had seen the man lift great masses of stone or timber, but no weight Jean-le-Cric had carried had ever taxed his powerful body like this. At some point Javert drew in a breath and forgot to take another.

It seemed an eternity before Valjean’s heels touched the ground.

Valjean released the chains with a sigh of relief, his hands drooping in their manacles. Javert finally remembered to exhale.

“Better?”

Valjean shook his head, but the trembling in his thighs had stopped, and his breathing had eased a little.

“Differently bad. It’s– But I think I can make it to nightfall now.”

“Good.”

The convict’s eyes were wet, and for once all his thoughts were legible in his face. There was pain, and a limp relief at the easing of it, and a quiet gratitude.

Javert knew no word of thanks would pass Le Cric’s lips. He did not expect one. It was enough for both of them that Valjean had placed himself in his hands.

He released the convict’s thigh and turned away.  
  


* * *

  
Javert’s shift would not begin until the work gangs returned at the close of the day. Until then his time was his own. He took himself up to the sea wall in the hopes that the brisk ocean breeze might clear his head, for something about the encounter with Le Cric had disquieted him.

Since their first meeting in the Saint-Valentin lottery several years ago, Jean Valjean had always obeyed him: promptly, silently, inexplicably. Javert had done nothing to earn it. He would have understood if Le Cric obeyed out of fear, for that was the natural order of things: for the guards to flog their charges into a cringing servility that lasted until their backs were turned or someone got drunk or a fight broke out over the latest illicit dice game. But to his knowledge Javert had never caned Le Cric, and the man who so boldly met his gaze across the prison yard was certainly not cowed in his presence.

He would have suspected some stratagem, but it was hard to see what advantage Le Cric hoped to gain by currying the favor of the most junior and least corruptible of the guards. There were others who would more easily yield to flattery, others with the power to do far more for Le Cric in return. Then, too, Valjean took no part in the bagne’s many intrigues. He was as remote and inscrutable to his comrades as he was to his jailers. To the extent that his behavior could ever be predicted, a prolonged campaign to seduce a guard seemed utterly unlike him.

No, Jean-le-Cric did not act out of fear or personal interest. He offered his submission freely, to Javert and Javert alone. The thought of having all that power at his command, the feral beast tame beneath his hand, was a heady drug, and Javert mistrusted it the more for that, whenever he wasn’t furiously beating off to the image in the toilets. But he could make no sense of it, and so he tried to put it from his mind. There was no point in working to unravel a knot that left no hold for the fingers or trailing threads to pull, and Le Cric’s motives made no difference in any case. Javert would do his duty irreproachably and impartially, and he would not be swayed by the conduct of a convict, whether good or bad. Let Le Cric keep his secrets and his inexplicable submission.

But today had been different. Today, Valjean had been not just obedient to Javert’s orders, but genuinely grateful for his intervention. In that moment of torment and despair, something besides the _pichot paire_ had penetrated the convict’s impregnable shell. Javert had offered him one of the hardest won truths of his life, and Valjean had heard him, truly heard him, and profited by his advice.

There was no telling whether the lesson would have any lasting effect. But all the same…

It was well known to every guard that the galleys were a quarantine, not a curative. Men committed crimes severe enough to merit their eternal disgrace and exile from society, but not so heinous as to demand their execution. Authority needed somewhere to confine such men where they could not repeat their offenses or frighten decent people, hence the bagne; it needed some means to recover the expense of their maintenance, hence the work gangs; it needed some method to control their bestial urges, hence the discipline imposed by the guards. The convicts’ bodies, lashed into obedience and yoked to the wills of better men, might yet be of some use to the state. Their souls, shriveled blackened things that they were, were of use to no one.

To take criminals and make honest citizens of them again – that was a task Javert had always believed lay beyond the power of man or God.

Certainly it was a task that lay beyond the power of the bagne. It was plain enough from the regular carousel of returning recidivists that the institution’s rehabilitative capacities were severely limited. Convicts left the bagne – or in Jean-le-Cric’s case, failed to leave it – no better than they came in, and in some cases considerably worse. The penologists believed they could alter this fundamental law of criminal psychology with their clever rope tricks, but Javert took that for an optimistic delusion. He knew only too well from his own life that the reclamation of a debased soul demanded iron discipline and eternal vigilance. A length of twine wrapped a few times around a man’s testes was not enough.

Neither was collaring. The senior guards claimed that the practice was intended for the moral improvement of their submissives, and Javert had accepted this doctrine as unquestioningly as he accepted every precept passed down to him by his superiors, but in his experience the convicts chosen for collaring were selected precisely because they were those least in need of improvement. The guards picked men who were resigned to their sentences, repentant for their crimes, humble, obedient, docile. Those convicts who’d had an education or came from good families, those who had plied some honest trade before an act of fury or avarice revealed their moral degeneracy, those who came to the bagne already filled with remorse for what they had done – it was these who were chosen to be collared.

Even the most biddable of convicts could never be fully trusted, of course, as that atrocious affair with Gueux had proven, but the guards saw no point in running unnecessary risks. The career criminals, those who like Javert were born among the dregs of society and raised without morals or shame, those who were incorrigible in their insolence or who were filled with seething resentment for their punishment and hatred for their betters: such men stood no chance of receiving a collar. A man like Le Cric would never be chosen. The guards might select him at the lottery so they could boast to their friends of their conquest, but no one wanted a brute like that sleeping at the foot of his bed each night. Even among the damned, society had its strata.

And yet, was it not possible that even a beast like Jean-le-Cric might benefit from the discipline, that he might not merely be controlled, but improved? With the right master, one who would not be frightened by his strength or deceived by his tricks, one who understood that for men like them the path of righteousness was so narrow that it did not permit a single misstep, and who would therefore monitor him with unwavering attention and rebuke him for every fault… Might such a master not have saved Le Cric from today’s punishment, and many more besides? Last night he had made it no farther than the sea wall before they caught him, and those few hours of liberty had cost him his ordeal in the prison yard and three more years in the bagne. A hidden file would have cost him a flogging only. His sentence would have ended already if all the guards were as diligent in their searches as Javert.

Perhaps in some dim way Valjean sensed this too. Perhaps knowingly or unknowingly he understood that his only hope for salvation lay in finding a master who could exercise over him the restraint he seemed unable to find in himself, who could quiet the rebellious spirit that drove him to flee again and again from the sentence justice demanded of him. Perhaps it was this that he was seeking when his eyes followed Javert around the prison yards. Perhaps it was for this reason that he became tractable and obedient at the lightest touch of Javert’s hand.

For now Javert could do no more for him than he had today. It would be years before he was senior enough to collar a submissive, and until then he bore an equal responsibility for every convict in the bagne. He had neither the authority nor the leisure to devote special attention to any one. But one day he would be an adjutant-chef, with a private bedroom and a black collar with his name embossed upon the leather and the right to choose any prisoner for his own. He would not have to feel then that Le Cric’s obedience was unearned, for his rank would justify certain luxuries. He would have proven, to his own satisfaction and that of his superiors, that he could be trusted to discipline and guide another soul.

If Valjean was prepared to offer him not just his puzzling obedience but a true, heartfelt submission… well. They would see when that day came.


End file.
